Skiing down a mountain...

Recently for my 40th birthday present, I went skiing for the first time, along with my brother who had already been a number of times.

Part of this skiing experience was lessons with a very nice but firm Austrian ski instructor. After 4 days of gruelling ski lessons (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and dropping from a group of 10 of us to just 2, our ski instructor decided we were ready to ski down the mountain.

Ski lift up and at the top of the mountain I looked down and my heart leapt into my mouth. Don't forget that by this stage I was physically and mentally exausted. I wanted to give up but you can't ski back up a mountain.

It became a case of not looking at the loooong loooong slope down but rather just looking at my ski instructor and copying everything that she did. She wiggled her toe, I wiggled my toe (apart from when I was coming down on my bum). I hadn't been so scared since I was a kid.

The moral of the story is that I didn't look at the slope, which would have overwhelmed me. I looked at what I could focus on and do - copy my ski instructor. I have never been so scared for a long long time but I got down in the end (and staggered to the bar for a brandy) and after that I was skiing reds and even a black.

I find myself in the same position once again as I try not to look at the enormity of the task involved in transporting myself and my family to Nigeria and setting up our new life. But as we say in Nigeria, "God dey".